As noted in U.S. Pat. No. 7,170,188, assigned to Intel Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif., USA, integrated circuits (IC) are typically housed within a package that is mounted to a printed circuit board (PCB). The package has conductive leads or pins that are soldered to the PCB and further coupled to the IC. One kind of package commonly referred to as a ball grid array (BGA) is an IC package which has a plurality of solder balls that interconnect the package to a PCB.
A package on package (PoP) is an integrated circuit packaging method to combine vertically discrete logic and memory BGA packages. Two or more packages are installed atop each other (i.e., stacked) with a standard interface to route signals between them. This allows higher component density in devices, such as mobile phones and the like.